2022 Bordeaux: Inflection Point

Even in a great vintage such as 2022, en primeur buying may be an outdated approach

- JAMES MOLESWORTH

In early April, I spent two weeks visiting some of Bordeaux’s top producers to get a handle on their newest vintage, 2022. This is the period known as en primeur, when the wines are offered to the trade for eventual sale to individual consumers. The wines themselves won’t be delivered for another two years, which raises a fundamental question about the process: Why buy now?

In the past, consumers could benefit directly from buying en primeur because the initial offering prices were typically lower than subsequent releases of the wines, known as tranches. Consumers who acted quickly were able to secure their favorite wines—and then, in many cases, to resell them years later at a profit. Those days came to a crashing halt with the 2009 and 2010 vintages, when châteaus raised their prices to never-before-seen levels, fueled in large part by an overheated Asian market. With the increase in prices, the chance for the initial buyers to profit down the road ended.

During en primeur, the wines of Bordeaux go from château to courtier to négociant to importer to distributor to retailer, with each of them taking their markup along the way. When the château starts off with a high price, there is little room for profit at the end of that chain. Most châteaus now just have a single release, as tranches have become a thing of the past. All of this diminishes the potential upside for those buying early.

The majority of buying during en primeur is done on an institutional level by négociants. Large and well-funded retailers in the U.S. market often take positions on